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Date:      Fri, 27 Dec 1996 15:34:40 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: unlink by inodes?
Message-ID:  <199612272234.PAA25350@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <199612191917.UAA28344@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Dec 19, 96 08:17:12 pm

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J"org writes:
> As Chris Csanady wrote:
> 
> > Yeah. :)  You really should try to use the fs as it was intended
> > anyway.  BTW, does anyone know the status of McKusick's soft
> > updates integration?  I think this would make a lot of people happy..
> 
> Do you perchance mean `mount -o async'?

No, I don't think he does.

Someone at the CSRG was rumored to be working on yet another 4.4BSD
release.

Rumor was that it was to include the Soft Updates code from the WWW
posted Appendix A to the Ganger/Patt paper on Metadata updates.

The Ganger/Patt code is from SVR4 and has been "sanitized" (read: SVR4
has mostly been ripped out, and a number of coding errors have been
introduced).

The problem with the Ganger/Patt code (besides that fact that Matt Day,
mday@elbereth.org, has already integrated it last year on top of my
layering patches required to make the namespace code work on the Artisoft
Windows95 IFS port of the BSD4.4 Heidemann framework) is that it is
not generalized... that is, it would be hard to maintain LFS, MFS, and
so on in the face of a hacked up UFS layer.

I am really skeptical of any soft updates implementation that doesn't
approach a file system as an event/action based system with commutative
and associative properties for the event/action node relations.  Doing
anything less means that you could not unify the model and abstract it
from a particular implementation (in this case, SVR4 UFS or BSD UFS and
FFS layers).

My personal opinion is that any implementation short of this would end
up being a kludge that would live on in infamy, a historical wart we
could never successfully kill, for ever after.

I've talked to Ganger a bit on this, but he isn't very hip on graphical
least-path soloutions, and so wasn't terribly interested (all his work
is in SVR4 anyway, so he doesn't have to deal with layer interactions
between stacking layers anyway, so for him it's a non-problem).


					Regards,
					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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